Tag Archives: Fake News

News

CNN and MSNBC cut off Democrat governors praising Trump’s handling of virus crisis

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Did you see Trump’s briefing on Monday night about the Wuhan virus? He was able to show a timeline of his responses to the virus, as well as clips of various Democrat governors praising his handling of the crisis. He also had tons of good news to report, and re-affirmed his intention to re-open the country at the beginning of May. But CNN and MSNBC were not pleased.

Here’s the 4-minute video that Trump showed that got him into trouble with the Democrat journalists:

The Daily Wire explains:

President Donald Trump played a video during the White House Coronavirus Press Briefing on Monday that showed the media’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak and highlighted his response to the outbreak and showed Democratic governors around the country praising the Trump administration for the work they did.

[…]The video highlighted the following comments from governors across the country. Here are a few of the examples included in the video:

  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D): “His team is on it. They’ve been responsive late at night, early in the morning and they’ve thus far been doing everything they can do and I want to say thank you and I want to say that I appreciate it.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsom (D): “He returns calls. He reaches out, he’s been proactive. We could that Mercy ship down here in Los Angeles, that was directly because he sent it down here. 2,000 medical units came to the state of California, these FMS, these field medical stations, and that’s been very, very helpful.
  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R): “The president has been outstanding through all this, the vice president has been outstanding, members of the Coronavirus Task Force, very responsive.”
  • New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D): “We had asked if we could have, if New Jersey could access to a piece of the beds that are on the USNS Comfort and the president came back, called me, assured me a few minutes before I walked in here to say that they would grant that to New Jersey. So that’s big step for us in addition to all the other capacity. I thank the president and vice president who were on the call.”

CNN cut away from the press conference shortly after the video started playing and MSNBC followed suit several moments later.

And here’s what CNN had on before cutting away, when Trump was explaining all the things that everyone (nurses, doctors, Army Corps of Engineers, etc.) were doing to solve the actual problem:

You won’t be able to get an accurate view of the world if you watch CNN and MSNBC. They can’t tell you anything that makes Trump look competent. They can only tell you things that make Trump look incompetent. And they’ll even lie, in order to do the latter.

I noticed that the mainstream media is bashing Trump for not taking the virus seriously, but the fact is that he took action to ban incoming flights from China at the end of January. Dr. Fauci didn’t even think there was a problem as late as the end of Fenbruary – which is not an insult at all, because that’s how things looked based on what we knew at that time.

The Daily Wire explains:

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served under three Republican and three Democrat presidents, apparently did not realize the threat of coronavirus as he said on February 29 that the virus did not pose a significant threat to Americans.

Fauci was asked on NBC News, “Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America. People are waking up right now with real concerns about this; they want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits, and if so, how?”

Fauci responded, “No. Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change; I’ve said that many times, even on this program. You’ve gotta watch out because although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything that you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread.”

Far-left “journalists” are trying to make it look like Trump doesn’t listen to Dr. Fauci or the other scientific experts, but Dr. Fauci says that’s not true:

I think it’s important for everyone to understand that the mainstream media is in league with the Democrat party, and they are constantly lying and distorting the truth in order to get their boy Joe Biden into the White House in November. (And they don’t care that he’s been credibly accused of sexual assault, any more than they care about the credible allegations of rape against their boy Bill Clinton).

It’s almost time for the campaign to start. Get yourself lawn sign, make a donation, volunteer your time, share stories on social media, etc. Whatever it takes to stop these secular leftist fascists.

 

News

Are gay activists telling the truth about violence against transgender people?

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Thinking about transgenderism
Thinking about transgenderism

I’ve been interviewing people to see how their views on moral issues are formed, especially the Christians. I noticed that most people don’t have time to consult evidence when forming their opinions. Whether they have a progressive worldview or the conservative view, it’s just easier to form that view based on wanting to feel good and be like instead of based on evidence.

Here’s some evidence from Quillette about one issue where views are often formed from feelings and peer-approval, instead of reason and evidence:

The claim that there’s an “epidemic” of fatal anti-transgender violence in the United States has been made widely in recent years. A Google search for the phrase “epidemic of anti-trans violence” turns up pieces from the New York Times, NBC National News, ABC National News, and the Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBT lobby group—among 2,500,000 other results. The HRC’s primary on-point article was headlined ‘A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence,’ while the Times led with ‘Eighteen Transgender Killings This Year Raise Fears of an Epidemic.’ Transgender Day of Remembrance has been celebrated since the late 1990s to honor those “members of the transgender community whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence,” and the American Medical Association has stated on record that fatal attacks on transgender people—particularly minority trans women—constitute a large part of an “epidemic of violence” against the trans community.

What’s interesting is that even the far-left Human Rights Campaign, which leads the fight to suppress free speech critical of the gay agenda, admits that the numbers are tiny:

The Human Rights Campaign maintains a year-by-year database containing every known case of a transgender individual being killed by violent means, and gives this number as 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and 22 in 2019. Not only do these figures not reflect a year-by-year increase in attacks on trans persons—they are remarkably consistent, and may be trending slightly downwards—they also indicate that the trans murder rate is significantly lower than the murder rate for Americans overall.

Let’s crunch the numbers. Taking the HRC’s highest recent estimate of trans fatalities (29) as representative, and assuming the transgender population to be 0.6 per cent of the U.S. population—although some trans activists argue the true figure is as high as 3 per cent, which would make the murder rate even lower—the total number of murders in a hypothetical all-trans USA would be roughly 4,800 per year (4,833). In other words, if you multiply the population of the US (327,167,434) by 0.6 per cent you get a current transgender population estimate of 1,963,004.6, and if you divide that figure by 29 (the number of murders) you get 67,690—one murder per 67,690 trans citizens. That works out as a projected annual total of 4,833 murders (327,167,434/67,690) in an all-trans America, with an annual murder rate of 1.48 per 100,000 Americans. That’s about one-fourth of the actual current murder rate: there were 16,214 recorded homicides in the United States in 2018 (five per 100,000) and 17,294 in 2017. While LGBT advocates may be correct that there is some under-reporting of the transgender murder rate because not all trans individuals are “out,” the fact is that the murder rate for trans people would have to increase by 300-400 per cent to match the murder rate for the general population.

Well, to be fair, even one person being murdered is too much, but most of these victims were not killed because of any kind of discrimination or “hate”:

Not only is there no “epidemic” of murders of transgender individuals, it’s also not true that most trans murders are motivated by “hate.” The first case I reviewed while researching this article, that of Claire Legato, involved a trans woman killed while attempting to break up a physical dispute over a financial debt between her own mother and a close family friend. This was not atypical. The conservative writer Chad Greene, himself a member of the LGBT community, recently reviewed a sample of 118 of the cases of anti-trans homicide compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. His conclusion: exactly four of the perpetrators were clearly motivated by “anti-trans bias,” animus, or hatred. In contrast, 37 of the murders were due to domestic violence, and 24 involved sex workers and were largely the result of the dangerous working conditions associated with illegal sex work.

[…]In addition to not being hate crimes, the majority of transgender murders are intra-racial. According to Greene, whose conclusions align with my own analysis, 34 of the 37 identified murderers of black trans persons killed between 2015 and 2019 (89.5 per cent) are themselves black.

I think these numbers are useful to have at hand, should someone try to convince you to accept their view by claiming that not accepting their view has led to “a national epidemic” of violence. I’m against trying to convince people by bullying them with victimhood in any case. If you have a rational case that some view is morally right or wrong, then make your case. I am always very interested to see how secular leftists try to argue for a moral standard that is binding on those who disagree with them, when they believe the universe is a random accident with no plan or purpose.

News

New York Times forced to correct smear of Justice Brett Kavanaugh

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Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that the mainstream news media is biased?

It’s very troubling to me that people in my office who are on the left still think that mainstream news organizations and “fact checkers” are unbiased and reliable. When the mainstream news media or “fact checkers” are caught in a mistake, my co-workers never seem to become aware of it. They live in a bubble, consuming “news” that confirms what they already want to believe about the world.

Here’s an example where the New York Times printed smears against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and then had to issue a correction.

The Daily Wire reports:

The New York Times was forced to correct a smear article on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after it was revealed that they excluded exculpatory evidence from their report.

“An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party,” The Times wrote in a correction. “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.”

So, they printed an entire article about an alleged assault against this female student, and the actual female student declined to be interviewed and did not recall the incident.

According to John McCormack of National Review:

“Omitting this fact from the New York Times story is one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.”

That’s mainstream news media, in a nutshell. In cases of fake news, the fake news story is always trumpeted on the front page. The correction gets printed days later, somewhere further back in the newspaper. If a correction is printed at all.

But what about the fact-checkers? Surely they must be more reliable about checking facts, before printing fake news, right?

What about Snopes?

Well, let’s consider Snopes, a famous fact-checker used by all the Big Tech companies to independently fact-check conservative web sites.

Here’s Snopes claiming that AOC DID NOT say that photos of the 9/11/01 terrorist attack were “triggering”.

Snopes says this claim about AOC is false
Snopes says AOC did not say it

But their own story says that AOC DID say that photos of the 9/11/01 terrorist attack were “triggering”:

Snopes says this claim about AOC is true
Snopes says AOC did say it, in their own article

Well, that’s just Snopes. Maybe other fact-checkers are different.

What about Politifact?

Politifact screwed up a fact-check during the Arizona 2018 Senate race.

The Daily Caller explains:

PolitiFact incorrectly labeled it “mostly false” that Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema “protested troops in a pink tutu” during its live fact-check of the Arizona Senate debate Monday night.

It’s an established fact that Sinema, a former Green Party activist who co-founded an anti-war group, wore a pink tutu at one of the multiple anti-war protests she attended in 2003.

Here’s their Politifact’s evaluation of McSally’s claim:

Who are you going to believe? Politifact, or your own eyes?
Who are you going to believe? Politifact, or your own eyes?

And here’s the photo of Kyrsten Sinema, protesting the troops, in a pink tutu:

Anti-war Democrat Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema
Anti-war Democrat Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema in a pink tutu

The Daily Caller notes:

A 2003 Arizona State University news article at the time described Sinema wearing “something resembling a pink tutu” at one of the protests.

The mainstream media, e.g. – the New York Times, and the major fact-checkers, e.g. Snopes and Politifact, are constantly making mistakes likes this. People need to understand that the major fact-checkers are not specially-trained investigators. They’re mostly just journalists – and journalists are known to donate overwhelmingly to Democrat candidates. I’ve blogged before about peer-reviewed studies showing the far-left bias of mainstream media journalists.

I’m not saying that journalists are just a bunch of uneducated losers who ran up student loan debt while getting drunk, getting high and being promiscuous in college. I’m just saying that journalism is not engineering. Engineers are accountable to reality. They have to solve problems in reality. Journalists often have very little education in reality based fields like math, science and engineering. They often haven’t learned to think critically. They are often swayed by feelings and peer pressure. You couldn’t trust these people to do anything useful for you, like fix your car, give you anesthetic,  or program a computer, etc. They don’t have reality-based skills that produce useful results. Their product is feelings – they allow a certain segment of society to persist in their feelings-based delusions. Their customers pay journalists for comfortable lies that affirm their moral superiority over their political enemies.

We need to have accurate views of the reliability of the mainstream media and the so-called fact-checkers, so we can be skeptical when we hear claims that sound far-fetched or made-up. Fake news is real, and it happens more often than you think.